


All or nothing at all

by winndixie



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Getting Together, M/M, New Jersey Blues, Post-War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-26 09:00:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17138864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winndixie/pseuds/winndixie
Summary: “Well, Dick. I guess that’s what happens when you push something as far away as it will go. That distance becomes a whole new tragedy.”They figure it out.





	All or nothing at all

### I. (but please don’t bring your lips so close)

“We need milk,” Dick says, sitting out on the porch. The suns rising over the field in front of him and the whole horizon looks plastic under it. He tries his best not to look it in the eye, and stares at the front of the house. Wooden, paneled, fixed. He is looking where he imagines Nix to be inside.

He doesn’t speak loudly and even so, Nix starts towards the open front door at his words. He swings lazily around one side and peers out at him. Dick’s chest warms and leaps because he’s calculated right: Nix is light and good now.

Nix walks slowly from the front door. “Major,” he purrs.

“Don’t do that,” says Dick, grinning, living for it.

Nix stops over Dick’s body on the steps, leans over him a bit. “You want milk, Dick?” he asks. “I can get you milk. You need anything else? ‘Cause I can get you that, too.”

“You’re a whole lot today,” Dick observes, and Nix finally collapses down right beside him on the steps. Dick feels something new in the air now that Nix is down right beside him.

He watches Nix look out over the fields, color melting away as he looks. “I’m a whole lot today,” he repeats to himself. Dick doesn’t say anything. Nix speaks again, now looking back at him: “Dick, this whole place looks cold,” he says. Like he thinks Dick can do something about it.

Dick doesn’t know what to say to that. He tries to catch his eye. “It’s April. We’re supposed to be warming up.”

“Then how come I’m freezing?”

“Let’s go inside,” says Dick, wanting to avoid this changing mood.

“I’m going to go get you your milk.”

“I can get my own milk, it’s alright.”

“No, I’ll go get it, I want the walk. I’m feeling strange, Dick.”

“I know.”

“You coming with?”

“No, you go on.” Nix, he thinks, but doesn’t say it.

Nix jumps up, and runs his hand over Dick’s head before he heads off. It’s quick and it isn’t soft, and even so, Dick finds himself just sitting there long after Nix has left. Sitting still, careful not to disturb the hairs as they are. He can still taste something that makes him think of his friend, and he’s freezing. The air around him does not move. 

* * *

Nix is wicked, and Dick wants him badly.

He finds it hard to relax now, and so he chops vegetables. He was hesitant to start cooking back when he first felt the urge, when they got home about a year back, because he didn’t want to hear the cracks from Nix. “And here I’d thought I’d gotten divorced,” Nix said the first time, when Dick presented him with a dish.

Dick likes to pretend he’s above all that stuff, but it makes him feel godawful, this urge to cook for Nix. He wants to take care of him, though: he’s always surprised by the whiteness of Nix, the skinniness. The man’s got no thigh.

The entire train of thought makes him miserable, and so Dick focuses down on his work. He likes the chopping. His back is to the kitchen window today, that way he’s not looking out at their terrible field. He’d said to Nix, “I’ll live in New Jersey. I’ll live in New Jersey, but I want some space around me.”

But the field that stretches out in the front of their island of a house does not make Dick think of home, of the reliable texture in a Pennsylvania skyline. There is nothing steady, or comforting, or walkable about this field. It is out of place, and there is something hiding in it.

The problem with Nix’s thighs, he thinks, is that they’re whiter every time you see them. So there’s no way to prepare yourself; the shock is new each glimpse he gets.

Nix comes in loudly through the back door with Zeus, and the mutt barks one sharp hello to Dick in the kitchen. “Hello, dog,” Dick greets. Nix grins from down the hall, and Dick zeroes in on the familiar face. “You cooking?” he asks, and Dick blushes heavily.

“No,” he says primly, and continues chopping.

Nix comes down the hall quickly and collapses in his chair, still looking at Dick. Dick’s gotten used to it, even lets himself bask in it sometimes, Nix’s looking. Dick figures maybe it’s left over instinct from the war, that Nix’s eyes just naturally follow Dick regardless of intent. It’s comforting. One of Nix’s eyebrows rests just slightly lower than the other, and that lazy eyebrow settles something within him. Dick goes back to his chopping.

“Zu’s still fidgeting,” Nix observes. “Can’t sit still in this house.”

Dick grunts. Chops.

He continues: “Guess a walk’s not enough,” and grins. “This goddamn dog, Dick. Just like you, I swear. God love her.” And Dick glances up to catch him smiling moonily at the animal.

Nix had come home a few months ago dead drunk with a dog, both of them sopping wet from rain. It had just hit two in the morning and Dick had been starting to squirm, and then gotten annoyed at himself for worrying. It had been like a scene out of a movie when Nix crashed through the front door just as a crack of lighting lit up the field behind him. Nix had laughed at Dick when he jumped, saying, “I know, it’s unnatural. I feel the same way looking at you.”

“What?” Dick had said, annoyed, still staring at the field behind the open door.

Nix gestured to the dog beside him, an unidentifiable breed. “The hair.” A shocking red, for a dog. It occurred to Dick later that’s probably why Nix chose the thing.

“You steal it?”

Nix had laughed, closed the door, and then the booze seemed to catch up to him in that moment. “I need to sit down,” he’d said, and collapsed next to Dick in the big chair. Nix never sat, he only collapsed. The full weight of him, every time. Dick smiled, watching the way Nix’s mop of hair, when wet, seemed to fly away from him. 

“Zeus,” Nix announced the next day. “Because we found each other in lightning.”

“You’re calling her Zeus?” Dick asked.

Nix whipped around goofily to look at him. “It’s a girl?”

“Course it’s a girl,” said Dick, and purposely didn’t elaborate.

“Well, it’s Zeus anyway.”

Dick looked back down at his newspaper.

“A divine leader. Had to name ‘im after you anyway, seeing he’s so goddamn orange.”

Dick had snapped his head up at that. “Jeez, Lew,” he’d said after a moment, and Nix had looked uncomfortable.

“I’ll take him for a walk,” he’d said, and stumbled around for the leash, taking off down the hall.

“‘Her!’” Dick called after him, fingering the edge of the paper, and thinking about in what kind of back alley a man finds a dog in the middle of a thunderstorm.

“What’s wrong with something like Rosie?” Dick says now, still watching Nix and his dog.

“Hmm?”

“The dog.”

“What’s wrong with you? Doesn’t she look like a Zeus?”

Dick laughs. “No, she looks like a Molly or something. Zeus is strange and pretentious, you had to repeat it twice when Mrs Wilkening asked.”

“It ain’t pretentious. He wouldn’t understand, would he, Zu? Mr. Cow College over here isn’t an Ivy kid like me or you.” The dog flops over onto her back, reveling in the attention.

“Least I graduated,” Dick mutters, and Nix spins around, all wondering, wondrous smile. It’s those times he doesn’t say anything at all when Dick knows he did good.

* * *

Nix is licking the table. Head down, tongue to wood when Dick walks in.

He looks up after a moment, eyes wide. “I spilled,” he says stupidly, and puts his head back down.

Dick knew who Nix was when he was a teenager, growing up in farms and fields. He knew him, he had the abstracted outline of this man in his head. Auspicious, rosy, dark, rude, head down on the table now. His neck. Dick dreamed a lazy cartoon of some kind of dangerous stranger with rule-breaking, outstretched arms. Nix has always been the antidote. Had Dick met him as a teenager, it could have been dangerous: how he could have been led astray. How much he almost wishes he had been. 

“Have some shame,” Dick says into the frame the doorway, ducking his head at the internal realization. Nix stands up.

“Don’t say that,” he says.

I’m going to spend the rest of my life with him, Dick thinks.

Nix moves towards him, and he’s coiled up tight tonight. Dick imagines his bones are as white as his skin. He thinks of chalk.

“It’s cold,” says Nix, looking frail.

“You’re lapping up alcohol from a dining room table,” Dick looks him up and down. He’s never looked at Nix and thought the word rescue before. Heal, capture, manage.

“Let’s go into the city, then,” Nix says, leaning against the wall beside him. “I’m all through here.”

Dick laughs. “You sure? Nothing left over there?”

“Let’s go.”

“I’ll drive.”

* * *

Dick enjoys these little dalliances into the city.

It does not feel strange or painful or traumatic to watch Nix dance. These are two non-intersecting circles, and Dick appreciates watching him charm his way across the room. He floats away from Dick, a cruel bounce to him, and sets that catlike grin onto his face. He dances with the women, picking one out of the crowd and doubling back to her every few dances. She’ll preen, it’s the same woman every night, Dick thinks. It’s when Nix glances back at Dick at the bar that he looks tamed, if only for a second. Dick’s eyes are already on him, the water raised to his lips, Nix looking at him, and it’s like a brick falling from the ceiling. Nix is tamed, and he turns back to the girl with dislike.

He navigates back when the song ends, the air gone from him. “Let’s go,” he grunts.

“Why? I’m having fun,” Dick says, meaning it. He wants to watch Nix sail again. He wants to send him back out onto the water.

“Don’t do that. Let’s go home, you’re miserable.”

“You always say that. I’m not miserable.”

“Then stop looking so damned disapproving!”

Dick flushes at the attention he’s drawn to them. “Nix.”

“Drink your water,” Nix mutters, settling down beside Dick.

“You want a drink?”

“Yes.” Neither of them move.

“We can go,” Dick says. He’s not bothered, they do this every month. It’s worth it, to see Nix dance.

Nix grunts.

Dick glances at the back of the room, where Nix had been dancing a moment ago. The girl is still there, swaying slightly to the music. She whispers to someone next to her.

“Go tell her you’ll be leaving,” Dick says.

Nix sighs. “Let’s not go home then, Dick.”

“Fine. Go tell—”

“Let’s go find a hotel.”

Dick feels everything within him ossifying, the challenge hanging in the air between them.

“It’s not that long a drive,” he says lightly.

“Dick.”

“Yeah. Go tell that girl you’ll be leaving, Lew.” _With me_ , Dick thinks. “Do her that courtesy.”

* * *

The last time they’d stayed in a hotel together was right after Dick got off the boat, and he and Nix had shacked up for a few days before he headed down to Pennsylvania. He got the impression now, as they headed towards the entrance, that they were walking along the edge of a blade. He ploughs forward, holding the door open for a wobbling Nix, who shakes his head and smiles as he passes; Dick knows what he’s thinking, he always does: _Open the Door, Richard!_ , Nix has been saying it for weeks each time they reach an entryway. He’ll sing it too— _Open the door and let me in!_ Dick can’t wait until it's off the radio.

The heat rushes in as they enter, and Nix shivers at the change in temperature. “Too warm,” he murmurs.

“Two rooms,” Dick tells the clerk, and Nix beside him does nothing, limp with some conclusion he’s just come to. He follows Nix’s back as they head up the steps, and is aware that something has dissipated since they left the bar. Nix doesn’t say anything as Dick follows him into the first room, doesn’t even turn around. Dick feels abruptly misplaced, frustrated. He starts forward. Nix throws himself down on the single bed. _And could I follow?_ Dick thinks. _Do I dare disturb…?_ The familiar words echo in his head, and he is stock still in the small room.

“You staying or going?” Nix asks, muffled.

“God,” Dick says aloud, helpless against it.

His boneless step forward is aborted by Nix’s words: “Do you remember, Dick—Do you remember that boy you found?”

“In Carentan?” He knows immediately what Nix refers to, and is annoyed again at him for bringing it up. He takes a step back, leaning now against the naked wall: he doesn’t want to talk about it. The boy, the soldier, had been face down in the dusty hedges of the road, one arm propped strangely up again the wall of a building. It was only this odd arrangement that made Dick look twice, and when he did, he jerked back. Against the cobbled wall, and Dick leans there now. Head down, watching Nix. The boy had been shot through the face, one, twice, and there was nothing left where he once had been. His fingers curled dreamily in the air. How things stack up.

He had told Nix about it later, quiet and humbled, feeling like a boy himself. They had been practically on top of each other in the tight barracks that night, no other choice. And remembering the crawling, swarming life in the boy’s hollowed out face had made Dick lurch forward, sickened at the bugs and burrowing holes taking over his own. Lurched forward, and shoved his face into Nix’s shoulder, as if to still the sensation against the solid pressure of his friend. Nix had said nothing, done nothing. Ticked sympathetically and shouldered Dick away with a fragile, “Hey.”

The back of Nix’s head stirs now, and he turns to look at Dick behind him. “Sorry.”

“It’s alright.”

“Sorry to bring you here.”

“I want to be here.”

“I don’t know. Could you be any farther away, Dick?”

And he understands, because Dick feels this abrupt distance between them as well, an empty field that was never there before when they shared lodges and foxholes and tents and beds. Dick can’t imagine sharing a bed with Nix now. The idea makes him antsy, and he wonders how they ever did it with so little thought. Their bodies were no longer brought together so unassumingly. Their lives were no longer in greenish sepia. Neither of them could handle it.

He’d like to go home now, he’d like to make dinner and eat comfortably across the table from his friend, and watch him kick kindly at the dog. To drink, to sit in his big chair. Dick washes the dishes and Nix watches him from the living room, and there are no lines being crossed, and everyone retires easily later to separate bedrooms. As it should be. No second thought.

And now they are in a hotel room, and there are no lights on, and Nix watches him expectantly from the bed. Dick has nothing to do with his hands, and he longs for that soapy kitchen sink. 

“I’m here,” he says, stubborn, inadequate. Out of this hotel room, out, out. 

Nix sits up, struggling against something, and tells him, “Well, if we’re not coming to some grand conclusion tonight, Dick, I’d like to go to bed.”

“There’s a bed in New Jersey, Nix. Why - ”

“There’s two beds in New Jersey.” He stands. “That’s not the point, I can’t stand that damn house.”

“What are you talking about? You bought the place.” And I clean it, Dick thinks. And I cook everything, and I read on the couch and write at my desk and I _like_ it there. “I assumed you wanted to be there.” _And you goddamn asked me to come._ Had that been an empty invitation? Was he not supposed to have said yes?

“Want? Where else would I be? This was the plan, wasn’t it?” He comes toward the wall, and Dick presses his back further into it. “Come home, work together, find peace, sing songs.”

“Nix.”

“It’s just cold there.” Nix stops short in front of him. “There’s nothing—well, fuck, Dick. It’s not what I thought it would be.”

“What did you imagine?” And it’s dark, and hands hover, but Nix’s eyes glitter along and they are both hoarse and swimming. Dick begins the process of thinking of maybe starting to lean forward now. And the darkness glitters around them, and Nix takes a big step back.

He starts pacing around the room, and it’s a completely different room than the one Dick is in. “I can’t believe I’m here sometimes,” he says. “Sometimes I’m dead, I must be, to be living there in that house with you and a dog in fucking New Jersey.”

“Lew.”

“I just didn’t think I was gonna be here, Dick.”

The wall reigns against Dick’s back, the only thing that he’s got a hold on right now, and he can count about seven things he’s been wrong about already tonight.

Nix looks exhausted, and rubs at his face. “That’s enough,” he says. “It’s late, Dick, go”—a wrong, shuddering sigh—“go to your bed, over there, the other room. Okay?”

“Okay.”

The air in the hallway moves slowly, and it’s hard for Dick to take a breath as deep as he needs. He turns and sees a woman sitting against the wall twenty feet down the hall, bare feet rubbing against scratchy carpet. Her hair is blond and wet and curling, and Dick initially finds her to be ragged. She looks rejected, and the impulse is to go over and help her. But when she looks up and sees him, her thin face pulls into a frown, and she gets up and bolts away, towards the elevator. Or maybe the washroom, Dick thinks. He can’t imagine that she has anywhere for the elevator to take her.

* * *

Nix wakes him in the morning with a bashful look on his face, an expression he only wears in the morning. He is embarrassed of whatever confession he thinks he’s made, though Dick doesn't understand what it is.

“This is strange,” Nix says, standing over him, hand still branched to Dick’s side in the act of waking, shivering slightly.

“Hmm?”

“Me waking you.” 

Dick’s habit of bullying Nix awake every morning had continued from the war, though it was occurring less and less as Nix stopped sleeping. Dick was greedy for these mornings, when he witnessed this wimpier, plaintive side of his friend that no one else saw. He always opened a window, the cold usually rouse Nix quicker, who had a lowered tolerance for chill these days. But Dick also liked this window opening as a ritual, feeling it cleared his head and prepared him for the day. It marked the separation cleanly between sleep-thoughts and day-thoughts. Between Nix-thoughts and Nix-thoughts.

“You awake, Dick?” Nix gives him another shake.

Dick had sunk into bed the night before in depression, with a desire to never climb out again: confused and furious at himself for the misinterpretation he’d made. Looking at Nix now embarrasses him further, and again comes the uncharacteristic urge to resist the day. He sits up: “We going home then? There’s yard work I want to do.”

Nix’s face heats and he fingers the end of the quilt. “We can go home now.”

“You sure?” 

Nix takes a heavy seat in the chair across the room as Dick struggles to sit up. He is wearing a shirt. Nix is not, and his shoulders sag in truth. “I just didn’t want to go back to that house, Dick.”

“That’s why we came here?”

Nix squints at him. “Yeah.”

Dick can suddenly feel the cool in the room as well.

* * *

Dick holds the door open for him on the way out of the hotel. Nix, his friend, thick-cheeked and big-headed, stops to look at him as he does. 

“Thanks, Dick,” he says, in a strange, determined way. He looks at Dick hard.

“What?”

“Nothing. Looking.” Nix raises his arm then, and paws kindly at Dick’s shoulder, moving up and touching his neck, just holding, not even petting. His palm is hot. They stand together for a moment in that special half-place between doors. He smiles then, nods, and brushes through the second door towards the street.

Nix ambles in that easy way as he moves, like his knees are heavy but his chest is light. He turns after a moment to see why Dick isn’t following. Dick lets out a low breath and glances around to see if anyone is watching them. He reaches up to touch his neck, only soft, checking for something. He lets the door swing shut.

* * *

On some weekend mornings, Nix wakes late. But there are more and more Sundays when Dick comes down the dim stairs to see Nix through the kitchen window, on the porch and smoking his seventh, his eighth. Dick can tell what number he’s on by the flicker of his fingers against the wooden steps; these are the happiest Nixon days, when he’s stayed up all night and seen the sun and gone through a pack waiting for his buddy to wake up. Zeus sprints around in the field, the paper mache field, chasing butterflies.

“It’s gonna be a good day, huh?” Dick asks him, settling on the steps. 

“Hey, Rusty,” Nix grins. “Let’s make a big ass pot of coffee, huh?” 

“Not sure you’re needing it.”

Nix put his hand in Dick’s hair. “Oh, I wanna ride this high while I’m on it.” The hand comes out. Dick hums. “What’s your big plan for this Sunday morning, _mon chou_?”

“Church,” Dick tells him. 

“Not today. Let’s go for a walk or something. Let’s see the woods.”

“You’re gonna fall asleep on a log, and I’m gonna have to lug you back here.”

“Well, maybe!” 

Dick laughs and lies back on the soft wood of the porch, and there is a hint of sun coming across his face.

“Dammit,” Nix says, in the tone he uses when he think he’s confiding or departing some grand observation, “I love it in the morning, when you can sit and see the whole big day from 6 a.m..”

“Sure. You should start waking up with me.”

“I wouldn’t like it half as much if I were out here every morning. I like the sun already hot and prepped by the time I’m out. Gettin’ up at 10, there’s no chill to worry over. Aren’t you cold these mornings, walking to church?”

“I’m not walking around this early.”

“All the same.” Nix glances down at Dick where he lies, and smiles. Dick smiles back, and Nix shrugs, “Guess it doesn’t matter too much.”

“Nope.”

“You fallin’ asleep down there?”

“You’re getting us mixed up, Lew, that’s you.”

“You’re crazy. I could go for a marathon right now.” They’re quiet. “Let’s go for a drive, Dick.”

“I’m comfortable. Wait for the sun, it’s getting just how you like it.” He stretches his arms up above his head as if to gesture towards the sky, and Nix laughs.

“Sure,” he says, and then, “I don’t think I have the patience right now to wait.”

* * *

“Richard!” Nix yells from the backyard. Dick throws his head back and groans. He does not get up. 

“Rich- _aard_!,” Nix calls again.

When Dick gets to the porch, Nix is standing down below by the car, shirtless and drenched in something. “Don’t call me that,” Dick tells him.

“ _Richard_ —”

“Nix, I swear.”

“No you don’t. Come for a drive with me.”

“What happened to you?”

“Zu-girl found a little creek on our walk. We went diving.” He leans against the car, and Dick takes a good long look at him. He is hairy and thick around the middle, and water drips from his black hair down onto his sloping shoulders. He looks at Dick, just waiting, and Dick thinks that Nix always has this look of raw expectation on his face, a kind of hopefulness. A look that says, Maybe you could help me, spoken in the single white dot of light in each eye, but a smirk too; a smirk that says, But probably you can’t.

He was so handsome, Dick thought helplessly, so dark and appealing. There was comfort in knowing that his hair, his eyebrows, his eyes, would always be the exact same color, dark all the way through, like a sheet of black paper that sat behind the skin. The contrast between the milk white of his skin and the jet black of his eyes was so pleasing to Dick. This contrast was so clear that Nix would look like Nix in any photograph, Dick could always recognize those shapes: the dark made darker by the light, and the light glowing against the dark.

He had angel lips, the little divot and the sweet perch plucked out of the rest of his face, at odds with his rough and stubbly chin. His papa’s jaw. That was the only way Dick could think of it, the way it reminded him of a father back home: a scouring surety, a thickness, the bristles on his chin and the bit of weight to the underside. How it felt to have it tilted in your direction.

Dick just liked to look at him, and especially now, how he leaned with such flirting cockiness against the car, how he made no effort to dry himself off or find a shirt. He just waited. And Zeus sat at his heels, gazing up adoringly. Dick hated that dog sometimes for reflecting so much of himself back at him.

“I’m working on some letters right now. Let’s go out later.”

“You let me down, Dick.”

“You’ll be alright. Dry off.”

* * *

“You wanna see a movie or something?” Nix sat on the counter, newspaper spread across the span of his lap, rubbing at a cut on his face from a drunken shave. Dick is still at the desk, where he’s been all day. At the moment, he is flushing at the music coming in from the radio. The room is small and dark, only two dim lights show from the lamps each of them sit under. Nix has come from the shower. He is in his boxers, and his legs are white. The wash is piled up in the sink. The lamp makes Nix’s thighs all the brighter.

“Hmm?” Dick asks, glancing up from his book. He hasn’t been reading. Nix had been humming. The cream of the wall blooms. _Now, daddy, don't let sweet baby cry_ —

“We could get out. See a movie.” _Pick me up on your knee_ —

“Nix,” Dick manages, “It’s so late.” _I just git so, you know_ —

“— _When you squeeze me_ ,” Nix sings, low and snickering. He watches Dick’s face. “She was a real firecracker, you know?”

“Sure,” Dick says. He wants it—quiet. He can hardly think in the dim warmth of the room, when he can see the goosebumps crawling up Nix’s thighs. He wants it quiet, because he likes it too, when they are in the same room but not speaking. Just in the same space.

“When you squeeze me,” Nix murmurs again, sweet, just to himself. He’s looking back down at his paper, and he scratches more at the cut. Lew sounds like lewd, Dick thinks. He is all burned up, and rubs the side of his cheek as well, feeling the heat.

* * *

On Tuesday, walking back home together, Nix smokes cigarette after cigarette. Dick walks just a pace behind him, pretending to be reading some file he’d been handed on their way out. But he watches Nix out of the corner of his eye. 

Nix lights another one, eyes darting all around the street. He works his throat before he lights any of his smokes, Dick has noticed, just letting his mouth get used to the shape of the cigarette. Letting it enter. Acquiescence, Dick thinks, and something flames in him again. He loves Nix’s focused face when he lights, looking like a boy as he struggles to keep both his eyes on the match as it draws towards his face. Such apparent concentration, but with no realization that he is doing it; the brain does not catalogue the moment, he is so clearly concerned with some other matter in his furrowed head. He shakes out a finger when it catches the match.

“What are you thinking?” Dick asks him, and he startles.

“Dinner,” he grunts. “Tired of sitting at that table. We should get out.”

“Oh, but I had a swell idea for using some of those eggplants,” Dick teases, and Nix groans, stops in the street. He waits for Dick to catch up right next to him, and they keep walking, in tandem now. Dick watches their feet, making identical drives against the ground all the way home. 

* * *

“Let’s take a drive somewhere. Get coffee.”

“You just made coffee. Sit down, Nix, you’re making me nervous with all that pacing.”

* * *

“I’m taking Zu for her walk. You should come with.”

“I told Ann I’d call her.” 

Nix looks at him, unimpressed. “Sure.”

Dick sits at the table with his hands cupping his face after Nix leaves. It’s Thursday, and it’s spring now, and he can see through the window the dead grass being blown around the cold field. He watches the blue that borders their big yard, and the four trees that nest in the corner of it. He feels on the edge of something. He wonders what he should be doing. He’s got two big sacks of seed out on the porch he’s been meaning to plant, and scolds himself for putting it off. Dick does not fully remember the last week, has lived through it feeling only that it was time necessary before something else could happen, a fog he had to feel through.

The sky sparks gold, and Dick waits for the thunder to follow, remembering the night Nix crashed home late with a dog, how the sky and field had panicked and lit up behind him. It had been a while since Nix had raised hell like that. In the early days, when they had first settled in together, he’d sneak off in odd moments, headed to bars and hotels with women. Dick remembered with a tightfisted anxiety the kind of sleep he’d have those nights, aware of Nix’s empty bedroom next door. But that was the Nix Dick knew how to tolerate, and the one he expected. There was a healthy youth to the way Nix could bound through the front door at 2am, calling _Sweetheart_! and meaning, Dick, get down here, I’ve had an epiphany.

The way Nix was now wasn’t quite right, drinking quietly and without joy and without sloppiness, sitting in his big chair late into the night, watching Dick at his desk. Tapping at his shoulder, saying, Maybe we could go for a drive. Get out for a while.

He cooed his love songs in the corner, and sure, he still splayed shirtless and hapless, and rubbed at his belly when it rumbled. He still balanced drinks on the edge of his fingers. He still had some secrets, Dick guessed, as he snuck out sometimes at lunch or told Dick he just had to get out for a minute, and would disappear for hours. But the way he holed up with that dog wasn’t healthy, and his grouchy insistence on keeping Dick company every night wasn’t necessary. It was an odd reversal of their natures. Back in the war, Nix could sit still for half-lidded hours while Dick was practically dancing behind a desk.

Thunder cracks, and Dick breathes in and out. There’s laundry to do, somewhere around here.

Nix hated this house. Dick knew it now, and it was a painful thing to know. It was that awful field, that waste of space, which sat gloating out in front of them. It was the loose and empty air that hung cold, even when Dick was sweating through his chores. They’d go out tomorrow. What else could he do to keep his friend around?

* * *

Friday begins with a terrific sore in Dick’s head. His eyes open slowly, aware of an unusual quiet in the house. Generally he’d hear at this hour little whines coming from the room over, where Zeus would be pawing at Nix to take her out, and Ni would murmur in return: Alright, baby. Just be patient, sweet girl. But there was nothing.

When Dick gets to the office Nix isn’t there either, and only stumbles in around ten with a clumsy apology to his secretary. “Dog got sick,” he tells her.

“She alright?” Dick asks, standing up when Nix appears in the doorway of his office, leaning against the frame as he always does.

“Oh, the dog’s not sick.” He waves his hand, glancing off down the hall. “Neither of us could sleep, that’s all. I wanted to show her Central Park. She’s never been.” He has an odd expression on his face. His lips are all twisted.

“You went to the city?”

“Sure, it was nice.”

Neither of them say anything. Something is deeply and tediously wrong in the way Nix refuses to look at him. After a moment, his body relents all tension and steps into the room, the door shutting behind him. In one ferocious motion, he lands on his knees in front of Dick’s desk, peering up at him.

“What are you doing?”

Nix looks confused: “I don’t know.” He looks up at Dick from where he kneels. His eyes are dark.

“Nix, c’mon.”

He looks up, black.

“C’mon, get up. Have you been drinking?”

Coal.

“I’m not drunk,” Nix says stubbornly.

There are two dark freckles on his face. Freckles—mole was too ugly a word.

“We’re—you have to get up. I don’t know what you’re doing.” But he did: Nix was surrendering himself. That renouncement of power in a man he respected so much was not something Dick would accept.

“Hey—” He tries.

Nix’s hands twitch at his knees, and Dick sees that he isn’t in some drunk stupor, just wading through a day that has stretched out too long already. He had woken early, manic with longing and stir crazy, packed up his dog and gone running. He wasn’t drunk. He looked nervous. Nix looked nervous a lot of the time. Dick thought it was likely no one had ever known this about Nix other than him. Nix was nervous, and his throat sometimes bobbled and his eyes sometimes glanced and his chin sometimes looked soft like a boy’s instead of thick like a man’s.

“Lew,” Dick says again. “Get up.”

Nix’s eyes just look and hold, steady.

“We can fix it,” Dick tells him. “Whatever it is, we can fix it.” He wonders what they look like right now, him standing so far above Nix. He thinks back to when he always knew they'd be parallel: when he leaned back, Nix would always lean forward. Their bodies were so uneven now. He didn’t like Nix below him, not like this. Someone would walk in and think Dick had something that Nix didn’t, but that wasn’t right: Nix didn’t know that he and Dick were the same, the exact same. Dick had always known it.

“Come ‘ere,” Nix finally mumbles, and Dick trips around his desk in an effort to get to him. Nix reaches out at once and clutches the leg of Dick’s pants, and Dick brings his soft brown head toward his body, hugging him, holds him just like that against his legs. It feels better that way, for them to be holding one another. Dick strokes his hair.

“Alright,” Dick says stupidly. “Just be patient, old man.”

* * *

They don’t go back to the house after work, in some silent agreement to get away. Dick drives toward the lights of the city. When they come into view, Nix gives a happy sigh. “ _Je suis amoureux_ ,” he says. “Twice in one day,”

“Well, you’ve gone crazy.” Dick tells him.

“Having me committed?”

“Where do you think we’re going right now?”

Nix laughs. He lights a cigarette, and props his heels on the edge of the window. He’s perky now, cruising and merry. They left the sun behind in New Jersey as it sank beneath the ugly sludge of the road. Nix had waved it goodbye, and laughed. He points out the strange blue of the sky in its wake, and he sings a short song he must have known from a long time ago: _Don’t you wish each day was only Sunday night_?

“You’re giddy,” Dick says, enjoying the show.

“Whatever will you do with me, Major?” He preens, and drags a finger obscenely along the ridge of Dick’s red, red ears.

“Cut it out. We’re going for a meal, not a dance. Don’t get excited.”

“A fancy dinner in the city isn’t really your style, Dick.”

“It’ll be helpful.”

Nix is silent. “How do you mean?”

“I’ve been—been having these conversations,” Dick says roughly, attempting to spit out what he’s been rehearsing in his head ever since Nix collapsed on the floor of his office. “With Shifty, you know, he’s had some trouble at home. Trouble like we’re having. Heck, like all the boys are. And I think I understand now, it was the unreality of the whole thing. A deviation like that will drive a shock into your body, one that feels like new grief. Or it is grief, maybe—” He glances with discomfort at Nix, who’s watching him carefully. “You got to dole it back out onto the world, whatever it is that hit you when you were over there. So we’re going to have a good conversation, you and me.” It’s an energy, he doesn’t want to say, because it sounds ridiculous. The shock is an energy, and the process afterwards has to be releasing that energy out of your body. Through cry, talk, anger: you had to put it back. The world would never be restored again to what it was if you didn’t.

“You are committing me then.”

“No. No, we’re just—“

“Like a shrink.”

“Fine.”

“I don’t like you trying t’ care for me like that,” Nix mumbles. “That’s not how it works.”

They went the rest of the drive in careful silence, as if to avoid any more of Dick’s prescription of talk.

* * *

“Well, it was fresh-fucking cold.”

“What else?”

“This is odd, Dick. I’m not going to lie about it. This is strange and wrong and odd. I don’t want to talk about it, and I know and you know that we’re not really supposed to. That’s been dictated by the silent voice of the universe, and I say we go along with the natural order of things and stop goddamn talking about it.” He takes a long drink, to punctuate, and gulps. “And furthermore—if you think I’m like Buck or something, that I got some trauma or shock or anything, you’re way off. I never saw combat like that. Don’t be cruel to me, Dick. I never saw combat.” 

He looks furious, but Dick doesn’t believe a word he says. “Remember how much time there was?” he asks. “Felt like we spent half the war just sitting in those holes.”

“Cold’ll do that,” Nix says, all angled down toward his plate.

Dick had meant to talk about the noise, the blood, the desolation of it. The boy weeping under a tree neither of them had recognized. But he can only think now of who Nix had been to him back in that forest. How the two of them would sleep at night, womb-like, in the pretended and projected warmth of one another. And in the morning, when the whole place was pale and quiet and lit up like a stage, Dick would sit shaving the best he could in the half-filled in dugout of the next hole over, with Nix back in theirs still sleeping off the alcohol. Both of them liked staying near to one another, Dick had noticed early on; Nix would sleep later into the morning when Dick kept nearby, and Dick’s own anxieties about the men would be lessened when he heard the sweet snores coming from behind him. It was a crisp memory, shaving in the morning, the comfort of the ritual keeping him sane. It had been peaceful there for a moment, as he breathed slow along with Nix’s sighs, coming from both next to him and below him, tucked safe underground. Dick’s feet had been half-submerged in the fresh and floaty snow. That one moment had been peaceful, if the rest tugging and freezing.

“That place was so white,” he says. “At noon, remember, with the sun at its highest, it would glow. It could blind you.” The memories, as they came, surprised him as they knocked into his body. Nix’s beard had grown in so ragged and dark—

“Guess you did have a lot of time on your hands then, Dick—were composing poems.”

Time had been the constant companion, only second to Nix. They’d have time to sit crouching in their holes, long into the evening, too frozen to relax fully enough to fall into the deeper sleep they craved. One especially cold night, just after Christmas, neither could keep asleep for the wracking of their bodies. As the sun rose that morning and light crawled under the tarp, both stared in numb shock at each other’s deprived faces. They could only look then, in the state of newness the morning brought, having not seen one other in this specific light before. Dick had noticed most of all the state of Nix’s chin, the thick hair coming in. “Should shave with me,” he’d murmured, barely making the decision to speak. His fingers twitched as if to touch, but stayed cramped against his stomach. Immediately Nix’s response, cracked and unaware: “Your hair looks darker,” he had breathed. “Not so red.”

“What are you thinking?” Nix murmurs, leaning over the table and looking at him with concern. “You thinking about the men?”

“No I was just, remembering the way—you remember? Oh, we all looked so ugly.”

Nix gives him a good laugh for that, and still close, confesses, “You especially. I thought you had no color when I met you, but you went damn near albino in that forest. Around your eyes was black. No color in your cheeks or your—” He draws back and breathes. “You looked more sick than ugly.”

Dick smiles. He wonders what Nix had been about to say. He wishes Nix flirted with him like he used to. Nix must believe on some level that the catch has already been made, to know he has no need to fish any longer—in the early days, with every quip or lip Nix made, Dick read him a overconfident schoolboy. He had found it charming, but boisterous. But this was not Nix showing off for the world, but for Dick. This, Dick knew now, was the beginning of their flirtation.

“Thanks, Lew,” he says.

“No problem,” And they’re silent for a beat, where in Nix smiles, and it is his good smile, the one that only can arrive in full if Dick is smiling as well. His mouth turns upside-down, the corners curling over and revealing the toothy top-lipped smirk beneath, that wouldn’t look quite so glad if it weren’t for his eyes in tandem: squinting, happy, and focused.

“Damn,” Nix says, getting into it. “You remember the shit Muck would get up to? You’re right about having too much time, you remember—” And he goes on, and Dick recognizes the strangeness of all this for what it is. Because Nix is looking at him with glowing interest and some quiet joke, and it is not an unfamiliar expression on him. Many nights, drunk and pushing Dick’s orderly out of the way, Nix would lean over Dick’s desk, leering and teasing. And even earlier, back at Toccoa, when they would catch eyes during a particularly impassioned speech of Sobel’s, it was this same expression. As if a perpetual candle hung below his face, casting a warm and loving light into his eyes.

Dick doesn't know how long it had been since he first perceived this look, just that it only became clear when it was suddenly was: Nix looked at him as though he were in love with him. It was his eyes, seeming to creep and jump and leap to Dick’s face, becoming darker and brighter at once. It was his mouth, which would loosen and part. His gaze would settle. Dick, who had never witnessed any order of romance before in his lifetime, still knew the look when he saw it. He wondered if Nix did as well; he had guessed that Nix did not know what he looked like, or what he felt. But those eyes had suggested since the beginning of the war that he would never stop Dick if Dick ever made any sudden move. 

The waiter comes by, and Nix snaps his fingers in front of Dick’s face. “Wine?” he prompts, and Dick nods distractedly. He is thinking of another waiter, in Jersey, when they had first gotten back, who had hung around the table and put his hand on Nix’s big shoulder. Nix had only encouraged him, leaning into it and rumbling through a cigarette voice, “You angling for a tip here?” Nix flirted with men sometimes. Dick had seen it, and he recognized the difference between pointed flirting and the comments Nix would make to just about anybody, because he could never care what he said and who he said it to. Dick wonders if Nix has ever touched another man. He could not tell. He’d noticed men in reaction to Nix as well, looking too long or speaking too low. Dick watched, and clocked always, Nix’s immediate recognition of this behavior and change in body language. He had to watch as Nix’s shoulders rolled back, his legs spread and eyebrows lower. At the elbows of bartenders, and one man who worked downstairs at the factory, and the odd officer too—Doby, that one Brit Nix had liked so much. Nix just liked having people stuck on him, and he reacted with the same seduction to this attention from both men and women. Dick always regarded these interactions with a benign but unignorable jealously. 

“Drink your wine,” Nix says, watching Dick with uncertainty, and Dick does. He’s been drinking a little wine lately, nothing much and nothing else, but likes the way it warms him from the inside. Nix loves it when Dick drinks. “You’re getting all melancholy on me,” he says now. “Thought I was the one that was supposed to be getting worked on.”

“Sorry, Lew. Guess I got a little caught up in it.”

“They’re strong memories,” Nix nods.

“You don’t ever think about it?” Dick asks him.

“I think about it. But it’s not the same. They feel like another man’s memories.”

Dick doesn’t like this. “They’re your memories, Nix. It happened to you and you happened to it.”

“Well, Dick. I guess that’s what happens when you push something as far away as it will go. That distance becomes a whole new tragedy.” He says this to his plate, but gives a sharp sudden glance up at the end, looking confused by what he’s said. He looks quickly down again, and there’s a silence wherein they do not look at each other. ”Listen,” Nix says finally, “I’d rather not deal with it." His hand wavers over his glass. “I’d rather not deal with any of this.”

“Yeah,” Dick says.

Dick drinks four glasses of wine over dinner. It is quite easily the most he has ever indulged himself in his lifetime, and he doesn’t feel near finished yet. This must be how Nix feels, when he cannot stop, when it is four in the morning and he is reaching for another glass.

Nix, far drunker than Dick is, cuts him off after his last. “C’mon,” he gruffs, “Let’s go find some place to put you to bed.”

Dick lets himself be led, fuzzy and unsure of how the city is shifting around him. He lets himself relax into the sloshing inside of him, submitting to the feeling, while knowing he will not drink like this again. He likes to know what is going on, and feels far from competent at the moment.

They stumble into a darker street, and Dick feels vaguely embarrassed for how he has let this evening stray. He says so to Nix. “This was supposed to be a productive dinner.”

Nix laughs, “Well, we’ve gotten somewhere with it. How do you feel about the Paramount?” His arm holds tight around Dick’s shoulder, and Dick feels great about the Paramount. He turns his head for a moment, pretending to look up at the tall buildings, while really smelling the smoke and sweat and drink that meet at the bend of Nix’s neck. This is what sex smells like, he presumes. He wants to have sex with Nix. They turn a sharp corner.

_Walk closer to me_ , he thinks.

Nix orders more whiskey at the hotel bar. “Trying to catch up to where you’re at,” he explains. They sit in chairs that remind Dick of getting his hair cut. The bar table is long and stretches across the length of the room, and he feels dizzy to see the repetition of the stools, the hanging lamps, the drinking men, all the way down. Nix’s shoulder stays pressed against his, and Dick’s mind jumps back to the Bois Jacques, the cold there a solid, final kind, cementing whatever it was they were. In that forest they didn’t look at each other, not the way they had in Bastogne. By the time they were in France, they had frozen all the way down. They rattled side by side, finally having reached that point where words became accessories only. He had memories of the comfort of leaning over Nix’s shoulder as he made call after furious call into regiment in that pitted-out forest. Nix would hold the maps. Nix would point and whisper and swear as Dick yelled down the phone. And Nix’s shoulder would always be there it seemed, to press and jostle against in the bland and squirming cold.

Now Dick only wants to go upstairs. “Hurry up,” he whispers, and Nix looks at him with lingering confusion. The bar feels over-bright and crowded, too open against the busy lobby.

Dick thinks, I won’t be this brave again.

“I don’t know what to do with you like this,” Nix tells him once they get into the room. It is very, very white inside, the walls and the furnishing and the carpeting all. There is a mirror hung against the white. As if any guest would be tricked into thinking a New York hotel room is any larger than it could be.

“Oh, I’m fine,” Dick admonishes, lying down on the comforter, the texture like milk. “You’re exaggerating it.”

“I carried you here!”

“Of course you didn’t.”

“Stubborn,” Nix laughs, lying down next to him. “Oh, I’m drunk,” he sighs, content in the way he only is when saying those specific words.

“See? Your perception is off, that’s all.”

“Don’t screw with me, c’mon Dick. You’ll never be drunk again. Be drunk with me now.”

“Alright,” says Dick, hushed.

They lie together for a long time, Dick thinking about Nix at war, Nix at home, Nix at bed. He remembers suddenly the thrill he had felt when Nix was new to him, back in basic. He had liked, simply, having a new body to be aware and keep track of. In those early days of Currahee, they were so watching of each other, so hovering, always with this awareness in any room where the other stood. That kind of knowing pulls two bodies together right away, and so they were always associated with one another. And Dick liked that too. He and Nix inevitably would isolate themselves within a space, even if that space were full of people, even if the two of them had entered that space separately. This pattern of intimacy was born out of nothing else but the bare unwillingness to leave the other. They would create a sort of bubble, suck all the air out of it, and set up camp inside.

Dick had been astounded by the volume of unventilated joy that came from a bond like that. He had never experienced it before. He became so used to having this awareness of Nix’s thoughts and body that he became lost without it. It would be strange to suddenly have his awareness cut in half, to lose half the space he usually took up. When Nix returned to a room after having left it too long, the back half of Dick’s brain returned to him with relish and leaping delight. Thank God, Dick would think, embarrassed and barely having the thought at all: I missed him.

He had wondered in those peachy early days if he accepted Nix back into his space too readily, how he both pulled away to make room for Nix at his side, and kept some of that space for himself too, just to keep close. It was incredible to think Nix hadn’t known what he was doing back then, always around, flirting and smirking and knocking their knees together. Nix really hadn’t known. He had just let his body and instincts go in the one direction they would. It was incredible; Dick had always known he had wanted to sleep with Lew. Right from the beginning, to push himself right up against him.

Dick misses the giddiness of those early days. In thinking this, his heart begins to pound madly out of nowhere, knowing before his brain exactly what he is going to do in this room, tonight.

Nix hears it, that’s how close he is. “What is it?” he murmurs. He must have been on the edge of sleep. All the lights are still on. The room is white like Bastogne, and Dick feels inside his body the same terrific adrenaline. At the point of death.

He turns to look at Nix, and Nix turns to look at him. “Lew,” Dick begins.

Nix’s eyes are large and smiling. He is flushed, and free with endearments as he always is when surfing on the surface of this much whiskey. “You like it, sweetheart?”

“Like what?” 

“The wine. You like it, don’t you?” 

Dick is slow to answer, watching the stubble shift above Nix’s lip. “Oh, yes,” he finally says.

“I shouldn’t want it, but—“ Nix eyes bore deep. “I like that I’ve turned you into a drinking man.”

“Oh, I’m not—one of those. I won’t be you about it. I just like the way—“ Dick sighs, his giddiness hiccuping his words. “It’s nice to feel this way once in every while.”

“But if you could feel that way all the time—”

“It wouldn’t feel like this.”

“Oh,” Nix says, breaking eye contact. He looks up at the bright ceiling, which is tricking Dick’s peripheral into thinking it’s daytime. “You want that light off?” Nix asks.

“Yes.” Dick is sure.

He hears Nix’s heavy body lurch and groan off the bed and stumble over to the switch. Before flicking, he turns his head back towards Dick, and gives him a lascivious wink. The room goes black, and Dick laughs. 

“You’re a magnificent tease,” Dick tells him when Nix lands back on the bed. 

“What does that word mean, Dick? We learn words from context.” 

“Then I suppose I’ve learned it from you, Yale.” They speak with manic speed.

“I teach you all sorts of things.” Nix rolls toward him.

“You see? Teasing.”

“So what then? I just like seeing you fidget.”

Dick laughs again at this, but doesn't feel the joy of it. “Then what’s the point of doing it in the dark?” Each question they ask jabs, Your move.

Nix doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then, “Let’s get under the covers.”

“Cold?”

“Never. Just don’t want them going to waste. Expensive, you know, a thread count like this.”

“Trying to buy me, aren’t you?”

Nix is quiet again, and eyes adjusted to the dark, Dick can turn and see the uncomfortable expression on his face. “You’re talking a certain kind of way right now, Dick.”

Dick doesn’t know what to say to this. He suddenly feels like a passenger on this bed. He doesn’t like not knowing the steps, the map. “I’ve never—“

“I know.”

“What?” Dick asks, annoyed.

“What?”

“What have I never done?” Say it, he prods.

“We’re still above the covers,” Nix whispers, sounding sad.

“Then _move_ ,” Dick orders, angry.

“There’s a tone I recognize.”

“ _Christ_ , Lewis.”

“Whoa, I—”

“Just get under Lew, I know you’re cold,” he gets up in frustration, and moving so quickly feels the alcohol reenter his head. “God,” he whimpers in defeat, putting a hand to his forehead, anger gone. He had only wanted pleasure.

Nix sits up too, and crowds him. “Hey, honey,” he hums, just right, and guides them both under the sheets. Dick curls against his side, and Nix lets him. They fall asleep like that, Dick in utter and bone-weary disappointment.

* * *

He wakes facing the window. He can see it’s still night, past three, he guesses. The New York skyline from the window is boxy and black. He can see every outline of every wire against the blue that’s creeping up from the horizon. He watches for a long time as this blue, a dark blue, far from dawn, inches up the sky, prodding the moon out of place. It’s a familiar feeling, that displacement. He wants security in his life, he knows, he can even admit to himself he wants dominance and control. But this is a symptom of neatness, of organization and clearheadedness. What he can’t understand is how Nix still has the ability to wander over and abruptly topple him so easily in the smallest of words. Here would come Nix, just when Dick finally felt a hold on things. And once you find there is a person who prods you so serenely from your hooked, fixed point—once they enter your space, they’ve entered you. They have you caught. Dick feels their legs brushing beneath the sheets. He can’t remember taking his pants of the night before. It feels as though there are only two points of his body: the eyes that watch, and the scratch of Nix’s leg. His heart starts up again. I won’t miss it this time, he thinks, and turns.

“Lew,” he shakes his friend’s shoulder. He knows, heavy from the alcohol and heavier from sleep, Nix will be hard to wake up. “Lewis,” he says, loudly, not wanting to wait any longer. 

Thin eyelids blink open. Eyelashes, Dick clocks. Needs a shave. Lips. Dick kisses him.

Nix’s mouth opens immediately, and Dick’s throats clogs up, as though he is about to cry. His mouth feels thick and powdery, dry in an unpleasant way until Dick finds his tongue. He feels all the light of the sun on his back, as though the whole dawn erupted at once when their lips met. Warmth, at last, he feels cocooned in it. There is no breath in his body, and he heaves himself over Lew, legs wreathing his torso, whose hands clutch and open in rhythm at Dick’s hips. Dick claws at his jaw. Oh, oh, oh, Lew breathes in little puffs, and Dick presses his mouth harder against him. It’s a little wetter than he had thought it would be, but also softer, sweeter. The rhythm of it is slow, and he settles in, tasting every meal and smoke and drink Nix has ever had, taking it from his tongue. 

Nix, then, lays freezing hands on either side of Dick’s face, and lifts him slowly off his mouth, as though removing a feeding tube from a man’s arm. “What time is it?” he asks Dick gently, who hangs above him, eyes and hands hunting his face for more. Who gives a God-ordained shit what time it is? he wants to ask, but is too beside himself already to swear.

“Maybe, maybe,” he breathes jagged, expelling only nonsense from his wet mouth.

“What, sweetheart?” Dick gets a good focused look at him. His eyes are clouded. His lips are dark and puffed. He is, and it’s obvious now, still very drunk. 

Dick lifts himself gingerly off of Nix. He collects himself in sad small heap beside him, and glances back toward the sky, only a little lighter now. He’d imagined the dawn. “Maybe four,” he says.

Nix nods, and sits up next to him. They curl, both cross-legged, like boys. The kiss, criminal, a frozen presence beside them. And Nix is drunk. Dick has never felt such absolute and apparent sobriety in his lifetime. He supposes he knows now what sobriety is because he has felt drunkenness, but has never so stingingly felt what it is to sit quietly before.

In the quiet, Dick stares at Nix’s mouth more, unable to distinguish exactly why it is that they aren’t kissing anymore. He puts a shaking hand to Nix’s knee and rubs, though this does not shake Nix from whatever he is looking at out the window. Dick looks at his hand, thin skin, freckles and faint hair and blue vein all visible, even in the dim light.

“I understand, you know,” Nix finally says.

“What?” asks Dick, hoarse.

“You shouldn’t feel bad about it. One of the first times I was drunk, you know, boy’s school. It’s not uncommon.”

“ _What?_ ”

“I’m just saying there isn’t anything you need to—I mean. It’s no crime to be drunk. I’ll forget about it. I understand.”

Dick finally makes eye contact with Nix, for what feels like the first time, and says, as clearly as he can: “I wouldn’t do that, Lewis. I am not 14 years old. I am a grown man. I make my own decisions all the time. Don’t treat me like a child. Don’t treat me the way—don’t treat me like the fumbling teenagers you associate virginity with. You’re arrogant, and you’re drunk. I did that because—you should know why I did that.” His words over run his breath, and he trips to a stop.

Nix’s drunk-dumb face seems to flail. “I don’t understand then.” He stands up from the bed, leers over to the window. Dick’s hand drops onto the milky sheet. They both watch the sky, coming into its own.

“I did it because I wanted it.”

“No. No, you—“

“Because I liked it, Nix. You don’t take that from me.”

“No. No, but I did it to you.” They both look at the pale peek of the sky making its appearance between the skyscrapers. “You weren’t this way before. The wine, the way you talk—I did it to you.”

“That’s insulting.”

“I recognize that.” Nix turns, and his face is still ruddy from kissing, and his eyes are lowered above the great brown smears of tiredness that rest there always on his face. He is doing, Dick acknowledges, his best impression of sobriety.

“You coward,” Dick bites out suddenly. He’s never thought that word in Nix’s direction in their life together, and Nix collapses underneath it. “I know you want it, you coward. I chose—I’m capable—” He rushes up and places himself at Nix’s front. “Do it,” he says. “Do it to me—I want it.”

Nix stares. He places his corpse hands against Dick’s chest. “No, no,” he says, and pushes. Dick lands on the bed. He stares with blown eyes at Dick, now below him. “You don’t know,” he begins, and doesn’t finish.

“I shouldn’t have said it, Lew. You’re not a coward. I’m sorry. You’re—“

“Shut up, Dick,” he whispers tiredly, hands now clutching his hair. “Stop it.”

Dick waits, feeling absolutely outside of his body.

“We won’t ever do it,” Nix says finally. “You understand? It won’t ever happen.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You wouldn’t. You, God, Dick. Who you are, in my head, I can’t bear to let you. Can you understand that?”

“You don’t want it? Don’t lie—”

“Shut up, Dick.”

“I’ve seen—“

“Dick. It won’t happen.” 

Nix as the serious one. Nix as the one who denies desire, the one who says no, the one who turns toward the door to walk away. And Dick, below him, resorting to begging. It feels like the final lethal blow that is delivered, and not from above, but from somewhere inside himself. He curls, and nearly fetal, says, “Lewis,” because that always worked before. The room is still dark enough to shade him. “Lewis,” he says, squinting, and in one last effort: “You’ll regret it if you leave, I think.”

Nix whirls around, and Dick thinks, Oh thank God.

“I’ll regret it, Dick?” He’s back to the bed in two strides. Whispers, “I’ll regret it?” and is gone.

### II. (if it’s love there is no in-between)

In Nix’s absence, Dick sits for a long time on the hotel bed, pantsless. Eventually he rises and collects, in a slow and drowsy way, the little clothing he’d shucked off the night before. He carries it dutifully into the bathroom, where he showers. He uses the hotel soap. He tugs, without any thought of it at all, at his cock a bit, but it responds with about the same enthusiasm Nix had an hour before. As he dresses, Dick pulls out of his coat a thin letter he’d received in the mail a day before.

Harry had posted the letter on a Monday, as he always did, but not from his usual address. Dick notices what he hadn’t yesterday, that Harry has written from a hotel in Newark. In his morning of crisis, Dick immediately is glad for what this presents to him—and he tears open the letter, standing there barefoot in front of the foggy mirror. “Visiting some old friends in the city,” Harry has scrawled in his scraggly writing, “Could include you and your best buddy if you boys are inclined. You know he takes weeks to respond, so depending on you to answer quick. Will be in town till Sunday.” Dick grins and flushes at what is the best news he could have gotten this morning. He goes to the phone and leaves a message for Harry, and decides to spend the day in the city until Harry shows, assuming Nix has taken the car. He wants to be distracted.

* * *

He enters the modern art museum around midday, and brushing past a group of fat tourists recalls the song he’s only just shaken from his head: _Oh I don’t want her, you can have her, she’s too fat for me!_ It had played in the coffee shop he’d sat in for the better part of an hour, and followed him stubbornly as he walked the streets. 

Now he tried to tire himself out pacing the wings of the museum, the first he’s ever been in that held this brand of wide, white grandeur. The paintings hung so large he could hardly process the images at all. What he did love was the colors, wide stripes of bright pink and green that broke through the noise in his mind, the voice that continued to slam in repetition _She’s too fat for me! She’s too fat for me! She’s too fat for me!_ He has the brief urge to bang his head against the Henri Matisse picture he stands in front of.

Instead he moves on, to an even larger canvas that disturbs him, a woman, her body naked and golden-bronze, kneels bound. She fills the entire surface of the piece, her head cropped at the top, seeming to bow pressed beneath the pressure of the frame. He notices her nipples, looks for a long while, before he sees the blunt red dent of a bullet in her head. The blood drips down past the rope at her midsection, to the belly that bulges beneath it. He can’t understand what race she is, who her oppressor is, and wants to. The bones of her knees press tightly against the skin, and Dick remembers Nix kneeling before his desk, only a day before. He thinks Nix would like the painting, not for the nudity but for the radicalism behind it, how it protests. He moves on again, resolving not to think of Nix anymore that day.

* * *

The first thing Harry says is, “Where is he?”

Dick keeps his chin up tight and reports, “In a fowl mood. Unavailable.”

Harry looks offended. “Even for me? It’s been months.”

“You know he’s getting drunk right now.”

“I never got in the way of that before.”

Dick sighs. “It’s not about you. I’m sorry. We argued.”

"You two?” Harry looks shocked, and Dick is annoyed the one topic he hoped to avoid has been raised right away.

“Don’t worry about it. How’s Kitty?”

Harry grins, the gap between his teeth on display. “Oh, we are just jolly. Her sister’s living with us right now, sweet girl. It’s like I got a family now, Dick.”

Dick smiles at that. “You must be so happy,” he says, sounding more wistful than he means to.

Harry narrows his eyes. “Out with it,” he says. “How’s the job?”

“I love the job. I’m grateful to have it. Got great men working under me.”

“So nothing’s changed in that department then.”

“That’s right,” Dick smiles. 

Harry hesitates in his response, covering for the fumble by reaching for his drink. “But you’re doing well,” he finally says, not really a question.

Dick thinks of early mornings out on the porch, walks to work and walks home, trying to make dinner and avoiding Zeus’s eager eyes, and he doesn’t think of anything beyond this. “I am,” he says, and reaches out for a new subject again.

They pass the evening casually, Dick happy to be back in the company of Harry, who he adores so much.

Later they pass along the water, leaning against each other. Harry is tipsy and humming, and in a flash of affection for him, Dick wraps an arm around his shoulders. Out on the black water of the Hudson, a grimy view from Pier 96, the dim white cloth of a boat staggers by. They can see the lights of Jersey across the river, he can imagine Nix standing on the opposite shore, 10 years old, thinking of city life: the women and the dancing and the bubbling of champagne. The whole rest of his life, Dick has accepted, is across this river. Wind picks up, and dirt blows softly around them. 

Harry wiggles out from under his arm and faces him. “We might have a baby soon,” he says. “We’re talking about it.” Dick claps him on the back, and laughs with joy, and looks back across the river to Nix.

“That’s perfect,” he tells Harry, thinking of a chubby toddler with curly hair called Hank. “What you always wanted.”

They walk quietly, Harry with his head tipped up at the sky, maybe pretending there are stars above them. 

He takes an inhale of breath, one Dick recognizes as preceding an important statement. “Yeah?” He asks.

“Oh,” said Harry. “I was just thinking of telling you something.”

Dick waits, stops walking to look up at the smoggy sky as well. Harry lights a smoke. “I shouldn't say,” he finally says. “It’s the kind of thing you sort of keep to yourself. But seeing as I don’t think you’ll ever leave him, one way or another—“

“Harry,” Dick warns.

“Oh, stop, let me finish.” He smokes rapidly. “I don’t suppose it matters. But I like getting things out in the open, and for some reason you’re making me think of it right now.” He pauses. “You know the two of you are the best friends I’ve ever had. And you know I hate that you’re away from me, together, having a grand old time. Well, that’s alright. But I’d alway had this idea about Nix, not that I ever said anything, but there was this one time that I came into his bunk, you see. Oh Christ,” he mumbles, dropping the cigarette, only half smoked. 

“You’re not making sense, Harry,” Dick says gently, but his heart is thrumming. He isn’t looking at him, embarrassed as always by nerves and sloppiness.

Harry kicks at the cigarette. “What a waste,” he murmurs. “Thought I’d learned to treasure these things.”

“Harry—“

“Damn. He had a man in there, Dick, and when he saw me he didn’t scare or run or anything, he just said, Don’t tell Dick, Harry, Don’t you dare. And here I am telling you, and I hope you don’t think any less of me for that.”

“A man?” Dick breathes. Harry glances around them dramatically before nodding solemnly, though they are perfectly alone. Dick is reminded that Harry is drunk, and foolishly wants nothing else in that moment than to be in the living room watching Lew slide around the kitchen in his socks, crooning Belle Baker. Once, so drunk his hair had stuck matted to his forehead in sweat, he had pinned Dick against the fridge and sung, _Oh dear little girl, have I made you sad?_ before laughing hoarsely and pushing away.

“I thought you should know. I don’t know what your morals are on that sort of thing, but you’re living together, and well, I don’t know, Dick. I didn’t know if I should say. That was years ago. I always figured there was something he wasn’t telling us. He’s my greatest friend, and I know he’s yours too, and it didn’t change anything for me, but—“

“What man?” Dick asks, and Harry looks surprised.

“Oh, I don’t know. I didn't see—why, you’re not going to say anything right? It was just a kid.”

“No, I—He, really?” Dick was losing his breath, and he bends down, squatting. He wants to ask what they were doing specifically, but can’t imagine what Harry’s response to that would be. “Jeez,” he says instead. He’s not sure if he’s surprised or not.

Harry puts his hand on his shoulder. “Hey, I know it’s a shock. But it doesn’t really change anything you know, Lewis just does whatever he likes. He was probably just having a night, you know, it’s not as though he’s a—“

“Stop talking, Harry,” Dick rasps. 

They are frozen like that for a minute or so, Dick bent double, not thinking, just staring at the half-gone, still-lit cigarette at his fingertips on the ground. Harry above him, swaying, hand on Dick’s shoulder still, probably looking at him with confusion and concern.

“I need to get back,” Dick finally says, standing. The black sky and the black water were separated only by buzzing dots of light, coming from the Jersey buildings. Jersey was ugly. Even the romance of city lights and groggy ships couldn’t light it up; it was ugly, he knew. But so was drink; alcohol was ugly, and yet Nix could dance around a room with that brown liquid shining from carved glass and look glorious. Homosexuality was ugly too, he knew, occurring in dirty alleys and stinking clubs. He wanted it all.

“Really? You could stay with me. Room’s not far from here.”

“No,” says Dick, decided. “I’m going.”

“You really alright? I know you wouldn’t swing at him, but I wouldn’t bring it up. He didn’t want you to know, he said that. He likes, well, he thinks of you—“

“ _Harry_ ,” Dick says, the way he used to, Harry always toeing the line.

“Alright, go home. Don’t say I said. I’m just drunk. Dick? You won’t say?”

“I won’t say,” Dick promises, and hugs his friend, and walks to the station for a midnight train.

* * *

Dick steps off onto the train platform at one in the morning, and calls Nix from a payphone to see if he’ll come get him. He picks up on the last ring.

“Hey, Dick,” he says, and his voice sounds very normal.

“I’m at the station,” Dick tells him, and can feel Nix’s dutiful nod across the line. 

“Ten minutes,” Nix says, but pulls up in five, and his head through the window is down when Dick catches first sight of him, all raggedy brown head, and that one color blurs under the rain that’s started up. Dick is still standing at the payphone from where he called, no one else around, and Nix’s head does not glance up to look for him, but stays down, so stubborn, he’s always so stubborn. Dick walks to the edge of the curb, and knocks once, light against the driver’s window. Rainwater smudges across his knuckles, and Nix’s face glances up. Through the wet glass he is raw and flushed-looking, but his eyes are bright, and his mouth ticks up at the corner. “Let me drive,” Dick mouths at him, and Nix nods, and pries open the door. He stands up quickly, at eye level with Dick. He puts a hand to Dick’s wet head. 

“Go ahead then,” he murmurs, and smiles oddly, and then wipes his hand on Dick’s jacket.

They pull off into the street in silence, before Nix flips the radio on. Cow Cow Boogie starts up. He flips the station and Dick smiles; he knows when Nix needs something melancholy. Nix likes to brood. _We’ll gather lilacs in the spring again / And walk together down an English lane comes on_ , and Lew sings in his croaky voice, without mind or meaning, and looks moodily out the window. 

When Dick turns off the car in the driveway, Nix turns to look at him. “Harry called,” he says, like he’s reporting back the intelligence of the day.

“Yeah, I saw him. Says he missed you.”

“Right,” Nix gets out of the car. He crunches over the dry and dead front lawn as he goes into the dark house. Dick cannot for the life of him get that lawn to grow green.

Dick goes inside too, and lies flat on his back in bed for about three hours. He’d told himself he’d let the sun rise at least before he gave up on sleep, but gets up before he sees any light at all in the sky. When he goes downstairs, he is happy and unsurprised to see Nix sitting in his big chair. He’d heard Nix rustling around in the night.

Nix sees him, but doesn’t say anything, only returning to the book on his lap. He has a cigarette in his hand, and about 14 filters crushed on the ashtray at his knee. Only God could know how that ashtray stayed balanced there for the shaking of Nix’s body. But he doesn’t look up again.

Dick goes outside and stands on the porch, and for a long while just stares out at that field in front of him, and the trees to the side, and the long dry grass, and the lightening blue of a sky still mostly dark, but getting lighter as orange rises on the street side of the house. He hears the birds yelling. He is barefoot on the cold wood of the porch, and in appreciation for that crisp, ironed-out cold of the morning, pulls his shirt off in one motion, without thought or commitment. And then he’s standing in boxers on the porch at 4 something in the morning, and wondering if Nix is right, if he’s been turned crazy by this life. He goes back in to the living room, shirt wadded in his hand, as if to show his friend what he has made of himself.

Nix glances up, and makes a face that is always endearing to Dick: where eyebrows lower and eyes scrunch up and lips pucker out. Nix always squints when he sees something that is funny or that charms him. He looks as though he is asking, “What under God’s sun are you doing?” when he makes that face.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Nix asks.

“Huh? I’m making coffee,” Dick tells him, and continues into the kitchen.

“Dick, please, I’ve heard you rolling around all night. You haven’t slept, you’re indecent, and you’re up earlier than the sun. You’re going insane. I’m fucking concerned.”

Dick ignores him. “Harry and I missed you last night,” he says, measuring out the coffee.

“I could kill you sometimes, Richard.”

“Sure you could.”

“What in the hell has gotten into you?”

Dick considers this. “I’m living free,” he finally says.

“Well, fresh Christ,” Lew swears, and stands, knocking the ashtray and all its contents onto the rug. Zeus jumps up from where she’d been under his feet, and goes over to sniff at it. 

Dick watches them blandly. “You want coffee?”

“I don’t like this,” Nix announces, and goes up the stairs.

Dick goes on up after him with two mugs 20 minutes later, and Nix is standing in his bedroom half-dressed. “You going somewhere?” Dick asks, handing over a coffee.

Nix takes it. “I’m trying to catch a train. Told Harry I’d see him before he leaves this morning.”

“Well that’s inefficient,” Dick says, and Nix rolls his eyes.

“Yeah, we know how you hate that.”

Dick sits on Nix’s bed and watches as Nix with surety buttons his shirt and rolls carefully the cuffs to his elbows. Nix clips a watch on, not the one his father gave to him. He takes a sip of coffee. He digs around for clean socks. Dick observes all of this, but notices mostly the unreality of the morning, both in its earliness and in its length. A morning that follows any sort of spectacular happening feels more acutely like a morning than the regular ones. This was what a hangover was, Dick knew, when the events of the night before were so changing and so consuming that their effect bled absolutely into the next morning. And you still felt it, though you felt it differently, not in its all-ness as it had been the night before, but against the realities of the rest of your life that confront you in the morning.

Dick has spent two mornings in a row like this one, the first at the hotel, and now here on Nix’s bed. He’s been awake 48 hours, and for this, does not feel quite alive. He has not slept between, only a bumpy nap on the train back the night before, which restored nothing and given him only a neck-ache. The alertness that came with the all-nighter only exaggerated the bizarre feeling he had. Staying up all night had never brought Dick the expected grogginess, at least not at first. Instead, he always felt more prepared for seeing the coming day arrive from so far ahead. Addicted to this perceived sense of control, Dick as a teenager had spent many full nights at the window of his childhood bedroom, a stack of books beside him, or some other project he was working on. A night held all the missing hours of a life, and he didn’t like to let those hours go wasted in drooling sleep.

In this surreal sense of mind, he watches Nix dress. He feels, more than anything, a particular and acute longing for Nix’s jaw underneath his hands, and as though the feeling were a cobweb, wants wildly to shake it from his fingers. He could feel, just quite, the prickling of Nix’s chin-hairs beneath them. Oh god, he thinks—Take it from me.

“Nix,” he tries. “I still want to talk about what we started talking about.”

“And what’s that, Red?”

Dick rolls his eyes. “Bastogne, the war, whatever’s causing you to—“

Nix slams his palm onto the sill of the window: “There’s no war, Dick! There’s no war to talk about anymore. There’s only—“ he falters.

“This?” asks Dick, knowing.

Nix gives him a long, exhausted look before turning back to his dressing.

Dick looks around for a place to put his mug of coffee, and notices that he is shaking. From the caffeine, maybe. The mug goes to the bedside table. His hands go to his side, wiping sweat against his boxers. Nix has opened the window at some point, and the cool dawn air coming through brushes against Dick’s chest, hardening his nipples, reminding him of his shirtlessness. He stands, and goes to the window, where the morning is, the air, where Nix is, now looping a belt around his waist. He looks up as Dick approaches, with that look he always has when Dick comes near to him, always letting Dick come closer with a look of wary reserve, like he will permit it but would rather it not be done. Like: If this is going to happen, let’s get it over with it now. Or maybe: Don’t you dare.

“Hey—” Nix speaks up when Dick is standing in front of him. His voice has nothing in it, and comes out ugly and throttled. “Hey,” he says again, clearer. “Not—not again Dick, come on.”

But it is not even past 5, and Dick has not slept in 48 hours. He puts a hand to Nix’s shoulder, and Nix’s eyes widen. His eyes are blown black, Dick sees, and is pleased. Dick can feel sweat soaking from his fingers into Nix’s nice shirt below. He and Harry must have arranged for breakfast somewhere ritzy. Nix shakes, and tries to shrug him off.

“Come on,” Nix says again. And then, “Winters,” as though this will slap Dick back into a professional manner.

Dick waits a moment, just looking into Nix’s eyes, and then says what he thinks is best,— “ _Lewis_ ,” trying to sound beseeching. He has a private theory about the name, that Nix is the name of his best friend, and Lew the name of that same friend when Dick is feeling particularly fond of him. Lewis, though, is something he gets hard at. Looking at him now, Dick thinks maybe the both of them get hard at it.

Nix opens his mouth, probably to ward him off again, but no sound comes out. Dick thinks gleefully: I’ve seduced him. He takes his hand, the one not on Nix’s shoulder, and places it hard and firm against the crotch of Nix’s chino trousers. The belt is half undone where Nix has left it hanging open. 

Lew’s head thunks against the window as he tips it back and groans, and with that sound Dick feels a completely different man take over his body. “Oh god,” he manages, and gropes the outline of Lew’s cock all the harder. The stiff warmth of it is good in his hand. His right hand moves from Lew’s shoulder to his neck, the back of his head, his jaw, and he is not looking at Lew any longer, he can’t bear it, not with how fast his heart is already going. Instead he keeps his head down and focused, which is something he is good at, a task.

He flips opened the belt easily, and the fly comes down with it. He rubs his hand across Lew’s jaw, feeling the burn of the beard, and then in the same moment the idea crosses his mind, rubs his face against that burn. It is in this position, plastered fully against Lew’s body, face against face, that he brings Lew’s cock out of his shorts. “Christ,” Lew hisses against his ear, hips jerking, both his hands coming around to grip Dick’s waist. “Dick, oh Christ.”

Dick thinks first to jack him off, and begins the process before instead dropping to his knees, submitting to the curiosity of the action, something he’d always wondered over. His hands go to Lew’s waist. Lew’s hands go to his hair. “ _Dick_ , what the fuck. I’ll—“

“Shh,” Dick says, and then he gets his whole mouth on it.

He opens his mouth as wide as it goes, and lets the spit get everywhere, knowing at the least how keep a cock wet. He flattens his tongue and wraps his lips around the head, sucking at it. Lew, from what he can tell, is hyperventilating above him, hands grasping and groping at once into Dick’s hair, around Dick’s jaw. A thumb and forefinger tug briefly at the lobe of his ear. Dick tries to take him down more fully, and Lew lets out a high, angry breath, hissing, “Christ, oh Christ,” again and again.

Dick pushes Lew’s shaking hips against the rough of the wall, trying to still him, and now in better control opens his mouth wider around his cock, taking deep and steady breaths through his nose, sucking in the strong and sticky smell. He runs his lips once down as far as he can, and back up again, and down and then up, fingers pressing harder into Lew’s skin, and Lew above him chanting a stream of nonsense that begins, “How am I supposed to—“ and cuts off somewhere in the middle, and ends, “what I wouldn’t _do_.” Dick is surprised at all the sensations at once, the choked-off burning in his throat, the welling of tears in his eyes. The hot press of Lew’s cock filling his whole mouth at once, and the sweet ache that holds his whole face.

He’s not sure if he likes what he’s doing, only that he is chasing whatever words he can pull from Lew’s mouth. As he sucks, and rises and falls, and presses and releases, Lew’s fingers begin to jerk at his scalp, and Dick hums in response. Lew groans, “Don’t stop, oh God, if you ever, don’t,” and Dick understands the call and response of each of their actions, that his cramping knuckles and open jaw sends Lew to the same place Lew’s tugging and whining sends Dick. 

And then Lew’s cock hits deep for the first time, somewhere in the back of Dick’s throat, and he swallows the gag but cannot keep back the tear that whimpers down his cheek. Dick keeps up the dutiful rhythm but Lew stops his swearing for a second to wipe gently away the tear with the sweet pad of his finger. When he does this, Dick notices for the first time his own arousal, and removes one hand from Lew’s hips to press against his boxers.

“Dick,” Lew says, presses the palm of his hand flat on Dick’s cheek, and doesn’t elaborate beyond this.

Then Dick is taking his other hand off of Lew’s hips, freeing him, and pulling his own cock out of his shorts. He jacks himself off with one hand out again the wall, trying to steady his body. And above him, breathing heavy and then shallow, Lew secures Dick’s head with a hand on either side of his burning face. And hissing through his teeth, he begins to screw Dick’s mouth, slowly, easing his cock in and out, face screwed up in the pain of holding himself back. Dick is looking at him now, head held steady but eyes seeking up, still watering, but seeing it all. He tries to keep his hand at the same rhythm of Lew’s hips. Lew looks down at him, and in the moment they make eye contact for the first time Lew’s whole body snaps forward and fucks, now truly fucks, the spit out of Dick’s mouth. “Look at you, look at you,” he recites, and clings onto Dick. “I, I can’t stand—oh Christ, oh fuck, I can’t—“

“I’m going to come, Dick, how are you letting me—? Oh. It’s just—“ He fucks forward, deep and then soft. Rough and then lingering. “Dick, I’m gonna—“ And Dick, with a hand now whipping as hard as he can against his own cock, opens his throat for Lew. And he moans, and does it as theatrically as he can, because Lew likes theatrics. And each hand with a fistful of Dick’s hair, he jerks forward one last time and finishes—“Dick, I’m coming, oh shit, _Dick_ —“ down the back of Dick’s throat, face screwed up and a darker red than Dick’s ever seen it, and Dick keeps his mouth tight against him all the way through, swallowing hard, gulping, losing a handle on his own cock—but it doesn’t matter, with his hand just pressed against it, he twitches and comes too, groaning.

When he finally pulls his head back and Lew slips out, his jaw is ringing, and he feels as though his face has been slapped seven times over. He drops his head, unable to look at Lew, whose quiet for the first time in minutes. He looks down at himself instead, where his cock hangs outside his boxers and his dirty hand, come all over, rest next it. He cannot repress the hot flood of shame at himself, though he had wanted this, wanted it as firmly as he’s ever wanted anything. He tucks himself back into his shorts, and wipes his hand against Lew’s rug, figuring Lew can handle the mark, or at least deserves it in some small way. 

After a moment, Lew drops down on his knees, and pokes at Dick’s shoulder to get him to look up. When Dick does, Lew sucks in a heavy breath at whatever is showing on his face. “Did you? Oh, you did,” Lew murmurs. He places one flat hand against Dick’s chest, and then thumbs the nipple, almost curiously. “Crazy,” he breathes.

“Sorry, Lew,” Dick says, and then feels less than stupid for backing down like that. But Lew gets a broad smile on his face and pokes at Dick’s lips wonderingly.

“You’re all swollen,” he says, and then tackles Dick to the floor, straddling his waist and kissing him sweetly, hands cupping Dick’s jaw. Lew licks into his mouth and Dick sighs into it, and could cry for the warmth of it. Lew rubs his face into Dick’s neck and giggles, and aligns their bodies so that they are flat on top of one another, belly touching belly and shoulder knocking shoulder. “Oh sweetheart,” Lew mumbles against the skin of Dick’s neck. “Oh sweet, sweet, sweetheart. I can’t believe you did that.” Dick curls fingers in Lew’s hair, his back itching against the press of the rug.

Lew sits up after a moment, legs still straddling Dick, and says dumbly, “Oh, my train.”

“Now?” asks Dick, pleasure-stupid, leaning up on his elbows.

“Yeah, I need to, I need to go.” He stands up, suddenly very tall above Dick, and his boxers are still ruffled out of the front of his pants, and his shirt is wrinkled and his belt is abandoned on the floor behind him. Worse off is his face, which glows red and raw, and hair that stands straight up above him. He’s breathing hard, and he shoves at himself, trying to get his own body in order.

“Lew, come on.” Dick goes to stand on wobbling legs, and settles for the edge of Lew’s bed. He looks at his mug of coffee beside, where he’d left it only a moment before.

“No, no, I promised Harry. Christ knows when we’ll see him again.”

“Alright, Lew,” he sighs. “Do what you like.”

“Well, just stay here. Don’t be crabby.” He does up his fly and bends down for his belt, not looking at Dick. Dick wishes he could be getting dressed as well, instead of sitting near naked like some girl. He half expects Nix to toss some money on the bed as he leaves.

“It’s Sunday.” 

“Well, alright, it’s Sunday.”

“I’ll be out all day,” Dick says. “I’ve got church—” Nix lets loose a loud cackle at that, and Dick flushes.

“Okay, go to church.” Nix strips off his ruined shirt and goes to the closet for a new one. He throws the hanger at Dick on the bed, still not making eye contact. “Repent,” he says.

“For God’s sake, Nix.”

“What?” He does the shirt up quickly. He doesn’t want to be naked around me, Dick thinks.

“You can’t stay?” Dick asks.

“Don’t be like that.”

“I just, I just—“

“What?” Nix finally turns and looks at him.

“I can still taste it, alright?” Dick bursts out. “I can still taste it.”

“You—what?” Nix looks amazed at him, red mouth hanging open. Dick notices then that the sun has risen fully. He hadn’t noticed while it was happening.

“Sorry.” Dick says. “I just don’t want you leaving like this.”

“Leaving you soiled?” Nix sings, cruel and short, cuffing his sleeves, and goes to leave for the bathroom. He’s breathing hard still. Dick can see a shine of sweat on his forehead.

Dick heaves himself up and goes to him, pressing him against the bathroom door. He kisses him very hard, teeth knocking, before backing off and kissing as sweet as he can with how frustrated he feels. When he leans back again Nix is looking at him with a bone deep bewilderment. 

“What am I supposed to do?” Nix asks. “I can’t do this right now.”

“We have our whole lives to figure this one out,” Dick tells him, and Nix’s eyes go hard and cynical. He nudges Dick away, and turns for the bathroom.

“No, we have half a fucking minute, Dick. I’m late for my train.” He closes the door. Dick can hear him pissing on the other side. He raises a hand to his scalded face, and then he leaves the room.

* * *

They sit across from one another in sort of manufactured way they never have before; Dick had come home late from the store to Nix and Zeus in one lump on the big chair. Nix had been whispering to his dog, reading the blotter, but had stopped when Dick came in. 

“How was Harry?” Dick had asked.

“You just saw him,” Nix had thrown the newspaper up in front of his face stubbornly. What a bear he was, Dick thought.

The whole way home, Dick had only thought about going to bed, a headache pressing against his eyes. But he’d put away the food and dragged his desk chair, in a high, rude sound across the floor, directly across from where Nix still slumped. And now they sat across from one another. Dick clips coupons from the vegetable catalog in a poor imitation of his mother. He glances up at Lew every few moments, who pretends not to notice. Only eyebrow, forehead, and hair poke up above the wide newspaper he’s probably not reading. 

Nix’s eyebrows sat in a particular way most of the time, one just below the other. Dick had first thought, years ago, that Nix put this look on his face purposefully, to appear wry and quizzical. He knows the oddity for what it is now: cute. Nix is totally unaware of his uneven eyebrows, as they sit like that in his oblivious moments of rest and relaxation. If Dick were ever to bring it up, he would feel foolish for the soppiness of the observation, and Nix would gruff, “What the hell are you talking about, Winters?” He always called him Winters if he were trying to put some distance between them. His eyebrows were just one of those details Dick had always thought he shouldn’t observe about other men, until he had met Nix and couldn’t contain the flickering of his eyes. He hadn’t been about to stop that collection of information from forming, every tick and twinkle, he saw all the details and dug for more each day. Sometimes his eyes looked in one order (mouth-eyes) and sometimes another (eyes-mouth) and even (eyebrows-eyes-mouth), and on the odd day (mole-eyes-mouth), and so on. He just liked to look at him.

Nix meets his eyes now unwillingly, cataloging Dick’s staring. “You gonna jump me again?” he asks, and then ducks his eyes back beneath the paper, as though he will not be able to look Dick’s response in the eye.

Dick doesn’t say anything. He knew Nix was hard to be around in these times when his charm fell way to stubbornness, that Nix often said things just to stand out, brash and overly boyish, aiming to pass as charming but not really being bothered when they didn’t. Dick knew this logically, had seen other men, men he respected and who respected him, be turned off by Nix’s behavior. Not hate him, just choose not to be around him. Dick accepted this reaction but did not understand it. He wanted to be around Nix all the time, because he saw every act of Nix’s for what it was, and the second you feel like you know someone like that you might as well love them. Little acts of bitterness and crudity could not bother you because they revealed the person all the more to you. Dick remembered this awareness of Nix’s behavior as a frustrating distraction during the war. He used to wonder why he put up with these certain traits of Nix that he wouldn’t be able to permit on other men, such as the sloth of him, the sloppiness—and even more, why he found other traits more excessively charming than he would on anyone else, the sarcasm and the nihilism he not only obliged but encouraged. It all made sense now.

“Nice of you to wait up for me,” Dick finally says, and Nix lowers his paper briefly to reveal a full scowl. Dick smiles. He’d always liked during the war how Nix would often tend to him when he got back from battle, if only just as a sturdy presence and the squeeze of his shoulder. They’d gotten into this pattern of a man coming home from at the finish of a day, and a woman waiting at the front door ready to pick up the pieces, wanting to hear the news of the outside, eager for ‘What’s on your mind?’ He and Nix as man and wife—Nix would slug him for that thought. Or who knows now? Maybe he’d kiss him. “You two eat?” he asks.

“Me ’n Harry?”

“You and Zeus,” Dick says, and he can see Nix smile from around the edges of the paper.

“I made something stew-y,” Nix tells him. “It’s on the stove.”

“Thanks.” He keeps staring. After a little while Nix throws down his paper.

“Alright, you—what is it?”

“Well, just tell me, alright? Just tell me.”

“No, we’re not doing this. Obviously we’re not doing this.”

“Obviously.” Dick repeats flatly. “Okay. You want to live like this? I don’t want to miss you every night.”

“Jesus Christ, Dick. You hear how you talk now? What hell has gotten into you? Is this the war? Are you breaking down?”

“It feels good. Just say it, Nix, it’ll feel good.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I just know this isn’t a life, at least not one I want for you.”

“Wonderful. You just keep making decisions like that for me, Lew. Well appreciated.”

“I don’t care! You’re not gonna live like that in this house with me, compromising every way you were raised just because I’m morally depraved.”

“That’s right! You’re allowed to have a grand old party, aren’t you, Lew? I know what you get up to, and it’s not just the women, is it?”

Lew sucks in a breath. He looks bowled over. “You know about that?” All his shouting energy is gone.

“I’m just not understanding what your logic is here. That you can run around doing that and I stay home and mow the lawn.”

“You like mowing the lawn! You never go out, you don’t—“

“That’s not the point! I want things, Lew, and I can’t believe you’d be surprised by that.”

“Well, I’m surprised, Dick, Jesus. Of course I am.”

“Okay.”

“And I’m not fully with you pretending me and some kid in the middle of wartime is the same thing as what happened, what—this morning.”

“And why isn’t it the same, Lew.” Not a question. 

“Because that wasn’t, we’re not—Dick. We keep doing that and you’ll blink and then it’ll be two old men in a farmhouse, still living together like kids do, and you wouldn’t have had your life.”

“You just described a life. Get over yourself, Lew. I’m getting dinner.”

Lew doesn’t even take a breath, just follows him into the kitchen and keeps going. “It’s not a life, we’ll just be bad actors, pretending we’re doing the same thing as every else.”

Dick takes a big breath and turns to look right at him. “But don’t you _want it_ , Lew?”

“I—I want you to be happy.”

“Then give it to me. My god, Lew, things get so complicated in that big dumb head of yours. It’s simple.

Nix offers no response to this. Dick can feel his eyes on him as he ladles the stew.

“When was the last time you slept?” Nix asks.

“Huh?”

“The last time you slept. You didn’t last night, and we barely did the night before.”

“I’m fine, Lewis.”

“You need to go to bed. This is why you’re so loopy. You gotta sleep.”

“I just got stew.”

“Fine, eat your damn stew. I couldn’t give a damn.”

“Go sit in your big chair, Nix.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Nix waves him off as he leaves the kitchen. Dick eats the food leaning against the counter, thinking very intently about nothing. He thinks about Harry with a baby. He thinks about Shifty back home in Virginia, trying to explain his dreams to his mother, and Lipton, who had written to say he was returning to school. Every other Easy man seemed to have the strength to go back to their old lives separately. He and Nix didn’t have this ability.

Nix pokes his head in the door, the dog at his heels. “Me and my girl are going for an evening walk. You put yourself to bed like a big boy.”

Dick gives him the longest look he can muster, but heads for the stairs the second he hears the door click behind them. He will sleep long and good.

* * *

He wakes later to cool dark, thinking bizarrely that he lies out on the open field behind the house. He can feel the thin tickle of the grass under the crook of his arm, the still air around him. He can see from far above the space that stretches around his body in all directions, out to the woodsy hills, out to the moon, the driveway, the porch that glows from Lew’s living room lamp. Dick knows in his dreamy knowing that Lew is sitting in his big chair under that lamp, waiting for Dick to find his way home. The flat dark of field won’t let him return, until bread crumbs appear, leading him back: Lew turns on the radio, and humming— _I’d rather have nothing at allllll…_ —but, no, Lew hates Sinatra, Dick thinks lucidly.

It is then that Dick can feel his pillow beneath his head, and the blanket crowding his legs. But still, if he turns his head to the right, he can see the four strange trees that border the yard in their military square formation. Stars too above him, he’s sure, if he tipped up his head to look. The radio gets louder— _But please don't bring your lips so close to my cheek_ —and Dick’s heart lurches at the words, at the voice, and he opens his eyes to the small darkness of the room and not the large darkness of the field.

_Don't smile or I'll be lost beyond recall / The kiss in your eyes, the touch of your hand makes me weak…_ Dick rolls onto his back, he feels the music, he is dreamy with it. He refuses to trade one dream in for another, he will live in both forever, trapped somehow between the dull moon and the flickering radio signal. He thinks he will doze off again. 

Lew’s voice carries the finale: _And if I fell…_ and then Dick may doze again, but just for a second before the sweet ending— _I want all or nothing at alllll…_ And then the radio flicks off, and it is the sudden lack of static that brings Dick fully awake. He looks at the time, and it is 3 in the morning. It seems that this is becoming his hour. He goes downstairs.

Lew sits splayed under his single lamp, thumbing through a tiny paperback. One big hand holds the book, the other plays with the radio knob absently. He looks up, half-lidded, at Dick’s footsteps. They are both barefoot. They both have beards coming in. They both squint at each other for a moment in the late night light. Lew gives him a small smile, and then tosses his book fully across the room. 

“And here comes my little orphan Annie,” he announces to nobody, maybe a snoring Zeus. “Get over here,” Dick doesn't argue, though stands awkwardly, as though at attention, in front of the chair when he gets there. Lew peers up at him, and Dick can see by his movements and by the smell that Lew is only halfway to drunken. He has long, long eyelashes. His eyelashes may go on forever. Lew puts his good hands on Dick’s hip. Dick leans over the chair, placing both hands at its back to hold him up. Their heads hover together. 

Lew lifts a finger, tracing it down the premature line at Dick’s mouth. “I love these lines,” he whispers.

“You hear what the man said, Lew?” he asks.

“What’s that?” Lew smiles. His finger moves to the lower lip.

“It’s all or nothing at all.”

Lew laughs. “Well, I guess that’s that then.”

**Author's Note:**

> Songs referenced:  
> -Squeeze Me, Bessie Smith (1925), "Now, daddy, don't let sweet baby cry—"  
> -Open the Door, Richard, Jack McVea (1946) "Richard, why don’t you open that door!"  
> -Sparking Sunday Night (some Ivy League tune, dates back to early 19th cent), "Don’t you wish each day was only Sunday night?"  
> -Too Fat Polka, Arthur Godfrey (1947), "I don’t want her, you can have her!"  
> -I’m Sorry I Made You Cry, Belle Baker (1916), "Oh dear little girl, have I made you sad?"  
> -Cow Cow Boogie, Ella Mae Morse (1942)  
> -We’ll Gather Lilacs, Tommy Dorsey (1946), "And walk together down an English lane…"  
> -All or Nothing at All, Frank Sinatra (1939), "I would be caught in the undertow…"
> 
> And the paintings at the MOMA, which would have been on display in 1946 and 47:  
> -The Piano Lesson, Henri Matisse (1916)  
> -Proletarian Victim, David Alfaro Siqueiros (1933)
> 
> Thanks for reading!


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